Halloween videos and lessons

Halloween lessons and lots more on TEFLClips.com

Among the YouTube videos and lessons on Jamie Keddie's award-winning teflclips.com blog you've got a Halloween Horror Story that's fun (and topical!).

If you prefer a more student-centred approach to listening, you could alternatively, and as a lead-in, get your learners to brain-storm the vocabulary they think will come up in a "Halloween Horror Story" and then listen and watch to see how many they got "right".

There are in fact two YouTube videos there. I prefer the second because it's so much shorter (one minute, not five).

Jamie also has a book, Images (OUP 2009), with activities that can be used for teaching of productive and receptive language skills, grammar, vocabulary and so on.

Previous Halloween posts:

• Witches and more stuff for Halloween lessons
  
• Halloween lessons
  
• Halloween project

You've got more Halloween links on the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk and on the British Council's LearnEnglishKids site.

Video sites for learning to use technology

Everyone knows YouTube, don't they?

But there are other great video sites, too, which are particularly useful for learning how to use technology:

• www.teachers.tv
• www.teachertube.com
• www.videojug.com

You can read about how to do something in a manual, or find a text-based tutorial online somewhere, but sometimes actually seeing how something is done is so much more helpful!

Macmillan dictionary for your blog

If you are using a class blog, you might be interested in embedding a dictionary in it. Macmillan's is real easy to embed (ie, install, if you don't want to get technical).

Here's how to install the dictionary, the appearance of which you can to some extent customise.

It will look something like this:



I've included it here in a post. You might want to install it somewhere where it will be permanently visible (in your sidebar, or at the top of the page, for example), as otherwise it will disappear from sight as you continue to post things on.

Neat (and it will give your learners the pronunciation, too...)

The idea was suggested in the Macmillan English newsletter, which is also worth checking out: it lands useful things in your mailbox regularly.

Fun with WordMagnets

WordMagnets: color them, size them, add more, drag and drop them...

One that comes from Nik Peachey's excellent Learning Technology Blog...

Nik suggests that you could use WordMagnets as a tool for Revising Short Texts and Syntax, on a computer and/or on an interactive whiteboard.

WordMagnets is free, doesn't require installation and enables you to copy and paste (or type in your own) short texts -- which are then converted into drag-and-drop "fridge magnets".

Apart from Nik's great ideas, the variety of simple "backgrounds" you can choose from would allow for the creation of simple exercises and games... Shown above, an example with two overlapping circles, which took me exactly 1 minute to create.

You certainly could use it with an interactive whiteboard -- but it would also work well if you have a computer room on which students could work in pairs creating exercises for each other...

(As Nik notes, regrettably you can't save your creations -- but they are real fast to create... You could take a screenshot, as I did, but you'll then lose all interactivity.)

But that's fun...!

Dogme and Technology

Dogme ELT is a "materials-light" methodology and also a very active discussion group.

The discussion group has got a bit hijacked of late in futile debates between the advocates of technology and its detractors but Graham Stanley now suggests a way forward in his Dogme 2.0 for ELT wiki, with a call for "vows" that would outline technology's place in Dogme ELT... Can you (and how...?) use technology and remain "faithful" to Dogme...?

(In case you wonder, Dogme ELT had "vows" when it was first set up back in 2000, as did Lars von Trier's Dogme 95 film-making, from which it took its name).

Dogme has been defined as being "conversation-driven, materials-light, focused on emergent language"; all of those things strike me as being "right" and the challenge is how to stay with that and still use technology -- without the technology taking over the conversation, and becoming the focus of attention.

One of ways that can be achieved, I think, is that the learners should use technology to create and communicate, not merely to consume... as I've suggested previously.

A similiar definition of Dogme comes from the blurb on a new book on Dogme, Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching (Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury, Delta Publishing, 2009): it's a "materials-light, conversation-driven philosophy of teaching that, above all, focuses on the learner and on emergent language" (my italics).

It's not nearly so well known as some of the ELT publishing giants, but Delta Publishing has got some really great books for English teachers...